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Exposed

Back in 2006, when I was 24, my life was cozy and safe. I had just been promoted to associate editor at the publishing house where I’d been working since I graduated from college, and I was living with my boyfriend, Henry, and two cats in a grubby but spacious two-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I spent most of my free time sitting with Henry in our cheery yellow living room on our stained Ikea couch, watching TV. And almost every day I updated my year-old blog, Emily Magazine, to let a few hundred people know what I was reading and watching and thinking about.

Some of my blog’s readers were my friends in real life, and even the ones who weren’t acted like friends when they posted comments or sent me e-mail. They criticized me sometimes, but kindly, the way you chide someone you know well. Some of them had blogs, too, and I read those and left my own comments. As nerdy and one-dimensional as my relationships with these people were, they were important to me. They made me feel like a part of some kind of community, and that made the giant city I lived in seem smaller and more manageable.

The anecdotes I posted on Emily Magazine occasionally featured Henry, whom my readers knew as a lovably bumbling character, a bassist in a fledgling noise-rock band who said unexpectedly insightful things about the contestants on “Project Runway” and then wondered aloud whether we had any snacks. I didn’t write about him often, but when I did, I’d quote his best jokes or tell stories about vacationing with his family.

Henry, seemingly alone among our generation, went out of his way to keep his online presence minimal. Now that we’ve broken up, I appreciate this about him — it’s pretty much impossible to torture myself by Google-stalking him. But back then, what this meant was that he was never particularly thrilled to be written about. Sometimes he was enraged.

Once, I made fun of Henry for referring to “Project Runway” as “Project Gayway.” He worried that “people” — the shadowy, semi-imaginary people who read my blog and didn’t know Henry well enough to know that he wasn’t a homophobe — would be offended. He insisted that I take down the offending post and watched as I sat at my desk in our bedroom, slowly, grudgingly making the keystrokes necessary to delete what I’d written. As I sat there staring into the screen at the reflection of Henry standing behind me, I burst into tears. And then we were pacing, screaming at each other, through every room of our apartment, facing off with wild eyes and clenched jaws.

My blog post was ridiculous and petty and small — and, suddenly, incredibly important. At some point I’d grown accustomed to the idea that there was a public place where I would always be allowed to write, without supervision, about how I felt. Even having to take into account someone else’s feelings about being written about felt like being stifled in some essential way.

As Henry and I fought, I kept coming back to the idea that I had a right to say whatever I wanted. I don’t think I understood then that I could be right about being free to express myself but wrong about my right to make that self-expression public in a permanent way. I described my feelings in the language of empowerment: I was being creative, and Henry wanted to shut me up. His point of view was just as extreme: I wasn’t generously sharing my thoughts; I was compulsively seeking gratification from strangers at the expense of the feelings of someone I actually knew and loved. I told him that writing, especially writing about myself and my surroundings, was a fundamental part of my personality, and that if he wanted to remain in my life, he would need to reconcile himself to being part of the world I described.

After a standoff, he conceded that I should be allowed to put the post back up. As he sulked in the other room, I retyped what I’d written, feeling vindicated but slightly queasy for reasons I didn’t quite understand yet.

Oversharing

One of the strangest and most enthralling aspects of personal blogs is just how intensely personal they can be. I’m talking “specific details about someone’s S.T.D.’s” personal, “my infertility treatments” personal. There are nongynecological overshares, too: “My dog has cancer” overshares, “my abusive relationship” overshares.

It’s easy to draw parallels between what’s going on online and what’s going on in the rest of our media: the death of scripted TV, the endless parade of ordinary, heavily made-up faces that become vaguely familiar to us as they grin through their 15 minutes of reality-show fame. No wonder we’re ready to confess our innermost thoughts to everyone: we’re constantly being shown that the surest route to recognition is via humiliation in front of a panel of judges.

But is that really what’s making people blog? After all, online, you’re not even competing for 10 grand and a Kia. I think most people who maintain blogs are doing it for some of the same reasons I do: they like the idea that there’s a place where a record of their existence is kept — a house with an always-open door where people who are looking for you can check on you, compare notes with you and tell you what they think of you. Sometimes that house is messy, sometimes horrifyingly so. In real life, we wouldn’t invite any passing stranger into these situations, but the remove of the Internet makes it seem O.K.

Of course, some people have always been more naturally inclined toward oversharing than others. Technology just enables us to overshare on a different scale. Long before I had a blog, I found ways to broadcast my thoughts — to gossip about myself, tell my own secrets, tell myself and others the ongoing story of my life. As soon as I could write notes, I passed them incorrigibly. In high school, I encouraged my friends to circulate a notebook in which we shared our candid thoughts about teachers, and when we got caught, I was the one who wanted to argue about the First Amendment rather than gracefully accept punishment. I walked down the hall of my high school passing out copies of a comic-book zine I drew, featuring a mock superhero called SuperEmily, who battled thinly veiled versions of my grade’s reigning mean girls. In college, I sent out an all-student e-mail message revealing that an ex-boyfriend shaved his chest hair. The big difference between these youthful indiscretions and my more recent ones is that you can Google my more recent ones.

In the fall of 2006, I got a call from the managing editor of Gawker Media, a network of highly trafficked blogs, asking me to come by the office in SoHo to talk about a job. Since its birth four years earlier, the company’s flagship blog, Gawker, had purported to be in the business of reporting “Manhattan media gossip,” which it did, sometimes — catty little details about writers and editors and executives, mostly. But it was also a clearinghouse for any random tidbit of information about being young and ambitious in New York. Though Gawker was a must-read for many of the people working at the magazines and newspapers whose editorial decisions the site mocked and dissected, it held an irresistible appeal for desk-bound drones in all fields — tens of thousands of whom visited the site each day.

I had been one of those visitors for as long as I’d had a desk job. Sometimes Gawker felt like a source of essential, exclusive information, tailored to the needs of people just like me. Other times, reading Gawker left me feeling hollow and moody, as if I’d just absentmindedly polished off an entire bag of sickly sweet candy. But when the call came, I brushed this thought aside. For a young blogger in New York in 2006, becoming an editor at Gawker was an achievement so lofty that I had never even imagined it could happen to me. The interview and audition process felt a little surreal, like a dream. But when I got the job, I had the strange and sudden feeling that it had been somehow inevitable. Maybe my whole life — all the trivia I’d collected, the knack for funny meanness I’d been honing since middle school — had been leading up to this moment.

Photo

Credit
Photograph by Elinor Carucci

When I started, the site was posting about 40 items per day, and I was responsible for 12 of them. The tone of these posts was smart yet conversational, and often funny in a merciless way. Confronted with endless examples of unfairness, favoritism and just plain stupidity among New York’s cultural establishment, the Gawker “voice” was righteously indignant but comically defeated, sighing in unison with an audience that believed nothing was as it seemed and nothing would ever really change. Everyone was fatter or older or worse-skinned than he or she pretended to be. Every man was cheating on his partner; all women were slutty. Writers were plagiarists or talentless hacks or shameless beneficiaries of nepotism. Everyone was a hypocrite. No one was loved. There was no success that couldn’t be hollowed out by the revelation of some deep-seated inadequacy.

Shortcuts

At my old job, it would have taken me years to advance to a place where I would no longer have to humor the whims of important people who I thought were idiots or relics or phonies. But at Gawker, it was my responsibility to expose the foibles of the undeserving elite. I felt liberated — finally, a job where I could really be myself! Never again would I have to censor my office-inappropriate sentiments or shop the sale racks at Club Monaco for office-appropriate outfits. But at the same time, I wasn’t quite convinced that the system of apprenticeship and gradual promotion that I’d left behind when I left book publishing was as flawed as establishment-attacking Gawker made it out to be. I’d been lucky enough, in my publishing job, to have the kind of boss who actually cared about my future. At Gawker, I barely had a boss, and my future was always in jeopardy. In my old job, I’d been able to slowly, steadily learn the ropes, but now I was judged solely on what I produced every day. I had a kind of power, sure, but it was only as much power as my last post made it seem like I deserved.

Sometimes I worried that I’d been chosen not in spite of my inexperience but because of it. Hiring women in their early 20s with little or no background in journalism was a tactic that worked for the site’s owner twice before, and I expected to be a victim of the same kind of hazing my predecessors were subjected to as they learned how to do their jobs — and how to navigate New York — in public. I’d once heard someone refer to us as “sacrificial virgins,” which didn’t seem too far off.

Then again, being a sacrificial virgin has always had its perks. The career arc of Gawker’s popular outgoing editor, Jessica Coen, seemed like evidence that talent could and should trump dues-paying. After college, she worked as an assistant in L.A. and maintained a personal blog. When, at age 24, she decided to move to New York, she had two career options: Columbia Journalism School or Gawker. She chose Gawker. Two years later, every magazine editor in town knew her name, and she was hired as the online editor of Vanity Fair. Maybe the days were over when young comers were slowly mentored as they prepared to assume their bosses’ titles, covering community-board meetings or fetching coffee.

The Feedback Loop

“I tried not to read the comments,” Jessica told me when we met for a drink just before I started work at Gawker. “Well, I went back and forth. But, you know, you really shouldn’t read the comments.” An hour into my first day on the job, I disobeyed her. I needed to know what people were saying about me. Dozens of readers had commented on the post introducing me, some of them dissecting the accompanying photo, some of them talking about how much they already hated me. Every time I wrote a post, the comments would pile up within minutes, disagreeing with or amplifying whatever I just said. Reading the comments created a sense of urgency, which came in handy when trying to hit deadlines 12 times a day.

I relayed some of the choicest bits to Henry, who also thought I shouldn’t be reading the comments. But how could I convey to Henry — who sometimes, onstage with his band, played entire shows with his back to the audience — the thrill of delivering a good line to a crowd that would immediately respond, that would fall over themselves to one-up your joke or fill in the blanks with their own suggestions and information?

The commenters at Emily Magazine had been like friends. Now, with Gawker’s readers, I was having a different kind of relationship. It wasn’t quite friendship. It was almost something deeper. They were co-workers, sort of, giving me ideas for posts, rewriting my punch lines. They were creeps hitting on me at a bar. They were fans, sycophantically praising even my lamer efforts. They were enemies, articulating my worst fears about my limitations. They were the voices in my head. They could be ignored sometimes. Or, if I let them, they could become my whole world.

When Jessica cautioned me against reading the comments, she also told me that the commenters loved it when she revealed personal details. Not only did I find this to be true, I found it to be almost necessary. Injecting a personal aside into a post that wasn’t otherwise about me not only kept things interesting for me, it was also a surefire way of evoking a chorus of assenting or dissenting opinions, turning the solitary work of writing posts into something that felt more social, almost like a conversation.

The commenters’ compliments were reassuring. And though I was reluctant to admit it, there was even something sort of thrilling about being insulted by strangers. This was brand-new, having so many strangers pay attention to me, and at that point, every kind of attention still felt good. Occasionally, a particularly well-aimed barb would catch me off-guard, and I’d spend a moment worrying that I really was the worst writer ever to work for the site, or unfunny, or ugly, or stupid. But mostly, in the beginning, I was able to believe the compliments and dismiss the insults, even though they were both coming from the same place and sometimes the same people.

Hooked

Like most people, I tend to use the language of addiction casually, as in, “I can’t wait for the new season of ‘America’s Next Top Model’ to start — I’m totally going through withdrawal.” And when talking about how immersed I became in my online life, I’m tempted to use this language because it provides such handy metaphors. It’s easy to compare the initial thrill of evoking an immediate response to a blog post to the rush of getting high, and the diminishing thrills to the process of becoming inured to a drug’s effects. The metaphor is so exact, in fact, that maybe it isn’t a metaphor at all.

When Henry and I fought about my job, we fought on two fronts: whether what I was doing was essentially unethical, and whether I was too consumed by doing it. I would usually end up agreeing with him on the first count — my posts could be petty or cruel — but that only made him more frustrated. It must have been hard for him to understand how someone could keep committing small-scale atrocities with such enthusiasm and single-minded devotion.

My Buddy List

Though Gawker’s bloggers often worked from home, I went to the office every day at first. I was used to communicating with most people I knew via instant messenger, but it seemed important to see Alex, my co-editor, in person. I figured that we’d be able to express ourselves more easily by actually turning to each other and speaking words and making facial expressions rather than typing instant messages. But because we were so busy, we continued to I.M. most of the time, even when we were sitting right next to each other. Soon it stopped seeming weird to me when one of us would type a joke and the other one would type “Hahahahaha” in lieu of actually laughing.

Another person I ended up I.M.-ing daily was one of Gawker’s most frequent targets, a blogger named Julia Allison, who, within a year, parlayed a magazine dating column into a six-figure TV talking-head job and then into a reality show, all while updating her blog several times a day. Julia wore skimpy, Halloween-style costumes to parties and dated high-profile men in high-profile ways — her tech-millionaire boyfriend collaborated with her on a blog where they took turns chronicling their relationship’s ups and downs. I was initially put off by Julia’s naked attention-whoring — “Attention is my drug,” she often confessed. In thousands of photos on her Flickr feed she posed, caked in makeup, like a celebrity on the red carpet, always thrusting out her breasts and favoring her good side. But in the midst of this artifice she was disarmingly straightforward about how badly she craved the attention that Internet exposure gave her — even though it came at the expense of constant, intensely vitriolic mockery.

I also I.M.-ed constantly with my co-worker Josh, who joined the site as “after hours editor” a few months into my tenure, which meant that he wrote about parties and restaurants. He was cute, and given the number of hours a day we spent trapped at our desks, the flirtation that developed between us seemed unavoidable. And the medium made it seem harmless — sure, maybe our I.M. avatars wanted to hook up, but our flesh-and-blood selves would be careful to make sure things stayed professional.

It was 11 p.m. on an April night in 2007, and I was in the back seat of a speeding Town Car on my way home from the CNN studios. I was on the phone with Alex, who was at a bar. “I don’t think I did a very good job,” I told him. I was still full of adrenaline from being on TV, and the noise of the bar in the background as he reassured me made me think it might be fun to join him, but the driver was already headed to Greenpoint, and I was too dazed to give him new directions.

Photo

Credit
Photograph by Elinor Carucci

I’d been a guest on an episode of “Larry King Live,” with Jimmy Kimmel as the host in King’s absence. I had been told that I would be talking about “celebrities and the media.” But Kimmel launched an attack on one of Gawker’s regular features, a celebrity “stalker map” that relied on unsourced tipsters, one of whom claimed to have spotted Kimmel looking drunk a few months earlier. It took me a minute to catch on to the fact that Kimmel wasn’t acting out some blustery caricature — he was serious about the idea that Gawker had violated his privacy, and he was genuinely, frighteningly angry.

Back at home, after wiping off the TV makeup, I logged into my Gawker e-mail account and found my in-box flooded. I scrolled through the first of what would eventually be hundreds — and then, as the clip of my appearance was dissected on other blogs over the course of the next few days, thousands — of angry e-mail messages. I ended up posting some representative ones on my personal blog:

“You got blown away. You looked like a little girl in awe of your surroundings.”

“I just want to tell you how uneducated and STUPID you came off during the appearance on The LKL Show. You truly are a cheap heartless human being, who will one day have to deal with the same kind of SCUM you are.”

“You were this giggling, hyper adolescent that did more to hurt your message, your site and your credibility than even coming close to simply neutralizing the debate.”

Watching the clip now makes me cringe. Called upon to defend Gawker’s publication of anonymous e-mail tips of celebrity sightings, I was dismissive and flip. My untrained, elastic face betrayed the shock and amusement I was feeling about being asked, somewhat aggressively, to justify something that I thought of as not only harmless but also a given: the idea that anyone who makes their living in public was subject to the public’s scrutiny at all times.

I expected the miniature scandal to flare and fade quickly, but for a while it seemed as if it would never go away. The clip made its way to Yahoo’s front page, and a reporter called my parents for comment. After a week or so, the volume of angry e-mail and blog comments subsided, but they stayed under my skin. I decided to try to develop a steely, defiant numbness. I told myself that the strangers who’d taken the time to e-mail me their rants were wrong and crazy, that there was nothing so bad about what I’d done.

There was a harder truth that I refused to confront, though. After all, by going on TV and having a daily blog presence in front of thousands of people, I had put myself in the category of “people who make their livings in public,” and so, by my own declared value system, I was an appropriate target for the kind of flak I was getting. But that didn’t mean I could handle it. A week later, I found myself lying on the floor of the bathroom in the Gawker office (where, believe me, no one should ever lie), felled by a panic attack that put me out of commission for the rest of the day.

I started having panic attacks — breathless bouts of terror that left me feeling queasy, drained and hopeless — every day. I didn’t leave my apartment unless I absolutely had to, and because I had the option of working from home, I rarely had to. But while my actual participation in life shrank down to a bare minimum, I still responded to hundreds of e-mail messages and kept up a stream of instant-messenger conversations while I wrote. Depending on how you looked at it, I either had no life and I barely talked to anyone, or I spoke to thousands of people constantly.

I started seeing a therapist again, and we talked about my feelings of being inordinately scrutinized. “It’s important to remember that you’re not a celebrity,” she told me. How could I tell her, without coming off as having delusions of grandeur, that, in a way, I was? I obviously wasn’t “famous” in the way that a movie star or even a local newscaster or politician is famous — I didn’t go to red-carpet parties or ride around in limos, and my parents’ friends still had no idea what I was talking about when I described my job — but I had begun to have occasional run-ins with strangers who knew what I did for a living and felt completely comfortable walking up to me on the street and talking about it. The Monday after my disastrous CNN appearance, as I stood in line at Balthazar’s coffee bar, a middle-aged man in a suit told me to keep my chin up. “Emily, don’t quit Gawker!” a young guy shouted at me from his bicycle as I walked down the street one day. If someone stared at me on the subway, there was no way to tell whether they were admiring my outfit or looking at the stain on my sweater or whether they, you know, Knew Who I Was. The more people e-mailed the Gawker tip line with “sightings” of me — laden with bags from Target and scarfing ice cream while walking down Atlantic Avenue — the more I was inclined to believe it was the latter.

Oversharing on Gawker

I didn’t want to go to Fire Island. The trip would take two hours, and it would involve the subway, the Long Island Railroad, a van and a ferry. For a month, I’d been doing my best to avoid any venture more ambitious than the trip to the grocery store a block and a half away, whose clerks were, besides Henry, pretty much the only people I still spoke to aloud on a regular basis. Whenever I left this comfort zone, I would be seized by one of my irrational, heart-pounding meltdowns, which I would studiously conceal from my fellow subway passengers or pedestrians. The panic attacks were about a desire to be invisible, but if I showed any sign that I was having one, everyone would pay attention to me. It was kind of funny when you thought about it, and if you weren’t me.

But Choire, my boss, urged me to attend the staff retreat at a house near the beach so that we could all bond as a team. Henry discouraged me from going — he didn’t want me to push myself, and we were comfortable, weren’t we, in our sad little world together? He was as surprised as I was when, the morning of the retreat, I managed to pry myself out of bed and get myself onto the subway. Walking into Penn Station, I saw Josh and his stylish duffel leaning against a pillar. He looked up at me and smiled in a way that immediately distracted me from thoughts of how miserable I felt. The freakout I was dreading never came, and over the course of the next few days, I forgot to always be anticipating its arrival.

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We each wrote our allotment of Gawker posts in the mornings, and in the afternoons we went to the beach. The water was freezing — it was still early in the summer — and we all ran into the waves together screaming. At night Choire cooked us elaborate feasts, and afterward we played Scrabble and watched bad movies. Josh and I sat together on the couch, and I put my head on his shoulder in a completely friendly, professional way. The next day, I let him apply sunscreen to the spot in the middle of my back that I couldn’t reach. As a joke, we walked down the wood-plank paths that crisscross the island holding hands. I also remember joking, via I.M. as we worked, about us wanting to cross the hallway that separated our bedrooms and crawl into bed with each other at night when we couldn’t sleep. On our last day, I congratulated myself on having made it through the trip without letting these jokes turn into real betrayal. And then, 20 minutes outside the city on the Long Island Railroad on the way home, Josh kissed me.

The next few weeks eliminated every constant from my life except my job. I moved out of the apartment where I’d lived for four years with Henry, and while I looked for a place on my own, I stayed in a tiny room in a loft full of hippies who brewed their own kombucha tea. I quit smoking pot cold turkey. My parents moved out of my childhood home to a different state because my dad had a new job. My best friend, Ruth, lived a hemisphere away in New Zealand, and though we sent each other epic e-mail messages and talked on the phone, I still felt unmoored in the way you can only feel after a breakup, as if you’re the last living speaker of some dying language. But even though this sense of disconnection from my old self and my old life was confusing, it felt mostly good. After all, what was so great about my old self and my old life, anyway?

I immersed myself in my job in a way I hadn’t even realized was possible — I thought about Gawker, one way or another, 24 hours a day, thrilling to the idea that a review of the restaurant where Josh and I were eating dinner might find its way onto the site the following day; pillow-talking about the site’s internal politics and our hopes and dreams about what we would do next. Just a few weeks earlier, I was scared to walk down my own block. Now I felt totally comfortable posting a picture of myself in a bathing suit on the site, inspiring Josh to do the same. I felt blazingly, insanely energized, and the posts came more easily than they ever had before.

I was happy, but I also wasn’t a complete idiot — I knew that the euphoria I was feeling was leading to a massive crash. I’d been clinging to Henry for months in spite of our differences because, in addition to the comfort and stability he gave me, he was my sounding board — someone with whom I could share my unfiltered thoughts, without worrying about being entertaining. In his absence, I was becoming more and more open on Gawker.

After the first night Josh and I spent together, I woke up as the sun rose and sat down at my desk to write a post that was nominally about a recent New York Times article about the shelf-life of romantic love. My boyfriend and I had just broken up, I revealed, and so I had been wondering whether love really exists. I wrote that I had concluded that it does. We can’t expect other people to make us happy, I informed my readers with total sincerity and earnestness, and we should live in the moment and stop obsessing about the future.

Photo

Credit
Photograph by Elinor Carucci

I shudder involuntarily when I read this post now. It’s like stumbling across a diary I kept as a teenager. It’s probably one of the worst things that I’ve ever written. The commenters loved it.

Gawker had recently added a counter beside each post that displayed how many views it received. Now it was easy to see exactly how many people cared about my feelings. The site’s owner didn’t like my “I believe in love” post, he told me, but he said he was O.K. with it because, as everyone could see, more than 10,000 people disagreed with him. Readers e-mailed me their own breakup horror stories and posted hundreds of comments, advising me about flavors of ice cream to eat, and I reveled in the attention. I had managed to turn my job into a group therapy session. “Emily, I don’t really know you any more than I know the people I see every morning walking the dogs,” one of them wrote. “It’s more of an imagined familiarity born out of reading your words for a year. But that took guts, all the way around. And I’m in your corner, inasmuch as a somewhat anonymous, faceless, nameless commenter can be.”

Would anyone still be in my corner if they knew the truth — that I hadn’t in fact been dumped, and that I’d thrown myself headlong into a rebound affair with a co-worker? I wished that I could tell my old Emily Magazine readers everything that was going on in my life and ask them for advice. I wanted to organize my stories into coherence and put them out into the world. But the Internet had changed, and my place in it had changed, too: I no longer had the luxury of writing something and imagining that the only people who might read it would be a handful of funny, supportive friends.

The Fork and the Spoon

My oldest and most responsible friend, Farrin, is a 37-year-old executive editor at a publishing house. Over breakfast, she was complaining to me that she had a problem at work: the head of her department had asked her to add a photo to her profile on the department’s Web page, and she wasn’t comfortable with having a picture of herself posted online.

The table we were sitting at was wide, maybe four feet across, and made of planks like a picnic table. I positioned my fork all the way on the left side of the table. “So here’s the spectrum of Internet self-exposure,” I told her. “And here’s you. You’re the fork.” Then I put my spoon at the right end of the table. “And here, at the other end of the spectrum . . . Julia Allison.”

“So where are you on the spectrum?”

“Well, I used to be here,” I said, moving a toast crust a few inches to the left of my plate, the table’s midpoint. “And now I’m here.” I put the crust halfway between my plate and Julia.

Farrin looked up at me, concerned. “That’s not good. I think you should start moving closer to the plate.”

Instead, though, I kept moving blithely closer to the spoon.

Heartbreak Soup

About a month after I broke up with Henry, my best friend, Ruth, and I created a new, anonymous blog on which we wrote to each other, as we had been doing via e-mail, about breakups and cooking. We named it Heartbreak Soup. At the beginning, we didn’t tell anyone it existed, but then we decided to add a sidebar of links to other sites we liked, and a tiny amount of traffic began to trickle our way.

We used pseudonyms for the people we wrote about, but otherwise our concessions to privacy — other peoples’ and our own — were very limited. I knew this wasn’t smart in the same way that I knew that dating a co-worker wasn’t smart, but my curiosity won out. I wanted to know what would happen if I showed myself as little mercy as I showed everyone else. “I’m bad at describing sex, or maybe everyone is,” I wrote at one point, but I didn’t let that stop me from trying! I ratted myself out for being a bad daughter: “I love my mom more than I love probably anyone else in the world, really. Also, she is more like me than anyone else in the world. But I often want to kill her. The thing that keeps her alive is how incredibly sad I would be if she died.” I described the symptoms and probable causes of a urinary tract infection. And I wrote about how painful it was to pack up my things in my old apartment as Henry — whom I referred to as “William” — stood over me watching. I puzzled over “how comfortable I feel around him, in spite of the fact that at this point I basically feel that he’s a crazy person who I sort of hate.”

Josh was one of the first people I told about the blog. I wanted him to know everything there was to know about me, after all, and besides, we talked about writing all the time, showing off what we thought were our best turns of phrase. He seemed flattered that some of the posts were about him, but he said he wasn’t sure how he felt about how candid I was being — though we’d never discussed it, it seemed like a good idea not to explicitly reveal that we were seeing each other, even though we left the office for makeout coffee breaks and broadcast maudlin love songs on the shared office speakers.

A few weeks later, I arrived home in the early morning hours after abruptly extricating myself from Josh’s bed — he had suddenly revealed plans for a European vacation with another girl — and immediately sat down at my computer to write a post about what had happened. On Heartbreak Soup, I wrote a long rant about the day’s events, including a recipe for the chicken soup I made the previous afternoon and the sex that I’d been somehow suckered into even after finding out about how serious things were with the other girl. Then I opened another tab in my browser and logged into Gawker to start compiling the morning’s gossip. For a few hours, my personal dramas took a backseat — sort of — to news that a Pulitzer-winning author had described his wife’s affair with a media mogul in a crazy e-mail message to his graduate students. I used the opportunity of this public figure’s indiscretion to pontificate about the idea that all heartbreak is essentially the same, though everyone thinks his feelings are somehow original and special. I was essentially talking to myself.

After Josh and I broke up, I started writing more and more on Heartbreak Soup — about my friendship with Ruth, my family and the weird, sad, terrifying, exciting aspects of being single for the first time in my adult life. Word had spread through my immediate circle of friends about the blog, and it was now getting a few hundred visitors a day — about the same as Emily Magazine before I started at Gawker. I lulled myself into imagining that these Heartbreak Soup readers, like those old Emily Magazine readers, might not even know what Gawker was, that they were reading just because they liked my stories.

One night, after writing a post about my first summer in New York, I put a link to Heartbreak Soup on my Facebook page under “Web sites.” By the next morning, this had begun to feel like a very bad idea, and I took the link down. The traffic spike that day seemed ominous.

Not long after, Josh told me he wanted to have a talk with me about how unsecret my “secret” blog had become. I had started working from home again, but I came into the city, and we stood, smiling awkwardly, outside the Gawker office, trying to figure out what to say to each other. I remembered the fight I had with Henry about the “Project Gayway” post. This time, I knew, I wouldn’t win — but then I hadn’t really won the last time either.

I offered to make the posts that mentioned Josh inaccessible by password-protecting them.

“You should be password-protected,” he said, and I laughed. When he went back into the office, I walked to the subway via the alleys where we’d once secretly kissed. At home, I wrote about what had just happened on Heartbreak Soup, and then I password-protected the post, feeling strange and sad.

Photo

Credit
Photograph by Elinor Carucci

Losing the Will to Blog

In October, New York magazine published a cover article about Gawker’s business model and cultural relevance. I took the magazine from my therapist’s waiting room into her office and read aloud from the article because, I figured, why waste any of my 45 minutes by struggling to summarize it? The article painted Gawker as a clearinghouse for vitriol and me as a semisympathetic naïf who half-loved and half-loathed what her job was forcing her to become. That week, when I walked around at parties, trying to elicit funny quotes from whatever quasi-famous people were there, all anyone wanted to talk to me about was Gawker. How could I sleep at night? someone wondered. I was getting tired of justifying my job to strangers, trotting out truisms about the public’s right to know and the Internet’s changing the rules of privacy. And I was getting tired of writing the same handful of posts over and over again. At the end of November, I announced my resignation via a post on Gawker.

For a year, I had been getting up each morning at 7 a.m., my thoughts jostling in my head, eager to escape. I wrote constantly, responding to the events of the day in real time, under perpetual pressure to condense everything I thought and read into something readers could consume. But now I was burned out and directionless, and without an audience, I lost the narrative thread. If no one was going to get on my case for not having read and catalogued every gossip item in the morning papers by 9 a.m., why get out of bed? For months, I thought that I hated the commenters who tormented me. Now, sickeningly, I missed them. I wasn’t reading The Sunday Times or New York magazine, because what was the point? I wasn’t logging into instant messenger. I had terrible writer’s block. My grandfather died, and I couldn’t even come up with a heartfelt paragraph to read aloud at his funeral.

On Heartbreak Soup, I was reduced to writing about not having anything to write about. I wasn’t cooking much, or reading much, or thinking about much of anything besides how miserable and emptied out I felt. When I posted about a week spent wandering around dead-eyed in Florida’s artificial beauty the week after the funeral, one reader left a comment recommending specific brands of antidepressants. Soon after that, I lost the will to blog altogether.

The will to blog is a complicated thing, somewhere between inspiration and compulsion. It can feel almost like a biological impulse. You see something, or an idea occurs to you, and you have to share it with the Internet as soon as possible. What I didn’t realize was that those ideas and that urgency — and the sense of self-importance that made me think anyone would be interested in hearing what went on in my head — could just disappear.

Unprotected

Two months after I quit Gawker, Josh wrote an article in the New York Post’s Sunday magazine about how violated he felt when I wrote about him on Heartbreak Soup, quoting extensively from my blog posts to make his points.

On the morning that the article hit the newsstands, I made Ruth — who had moved back to New York and become my roommate — read it first. When she finished, she looked stricken. “Emily, he’s so evil,” she said, sounding not at all reassuring.

I slumped to the kitchen floor and lay there in the fetal position. I didn’t want to exist. I had made my existence so public in such a strange way, and I wanted to take it all back, but in order to do that I’d have to destroy the entire Internet. If only I could! Google, YouTube, Gawker, Facebook, WordPress, all gone. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed for an electromagnetic storm that would cancel out every mistake I’d ever made.

“I’m taking it down,” Ruth called to me from the living room, where my laptop sat on a table, displaying our no-longer-so-secret blog.

I opened my eyes. “Don’t delete it,” I managed to say. “Just make it all password-protected.”

I lay there for a while longer. Eventually I read the article, which was, as personal betrayals go, far worse than I’d thought it could be. But the real power of the article, as Josh must have known when he wrote it, lay in the way that it exposed me to the new Gawker regime, which had already proved itself to be even more vicious than we’d ever been. If the article had been published when I was still working at Gawker, I would have been able to steer the conversation that it provoked. But now I was no longer simultaneously sniper and target — I was just a target, and I felt powerless.

Over the next couple of weeks, I sat on the sidelines and watched as the commenters — on Gawker, on other blogs and even on Emily Magazine — talked about me the same way they once talked about the targets I’d proffered for them to aim at. Many of them explicitly pointed out that this drubbing was my karmic comeuppance — after all, I’d punished other people this way. Now it was my turn. It was only fair.

By revealing my flaws to whoever wanted to look, I thought — incorrectly, as it turned out — that I was inoculating myself against the criticism my Gawker co-workers and I leveled most often. Maybe I was talentless, bad-complected, old-looking and slutty, but no one could call me a hypocrite. I had said that everyone was subject to judgment and scrutiny, and then, by judging and scrutinizing myself relentlessly, I’d invited others to do the same.

But maybe I was a hypocrite after all, because now I was beginning to feel that no one should be subject to that kind of scrutiny. Not Josh, not Jimmy Kimmel and especially not me.

Real Life

If I were going to completely disavow self-scrutiny and unedited opinion-broadcasting, it would mean the end of my life as a blogger. While I couldn’t make the Internet disappear, it had always been entirely within my power to shutter Emily Magazine the same way I’d locked up Heartbreak Soup. For about a week after Josh’s article came out, I thought about doing so every time I looked at my computer. But then, as panic and sadness faded and anger set in, I started having impulses in the exact opposite direction: I wanted to defend myself and set the record straight! A few months earlier, I probably would have done it too: typed feverishly for hours perfecting the most cutting blog post possible, aired every sad secret at my disposal in a quest for revenge, published the post as soon as I was finished, then checked back compulsively to see whether it had made things better or worse. But I’d finally realized that some defenses always backfire. True, I had the ability to say whatever I wanted and an audience of people who would listen, but the best possible thing for me to do was to ignore them and do nothing. And that is what I did. For two entire weeks.

Late one night, I unlocked Heartbreak Soup and wrote one last post there. In it, I talked about how a single blog post can capture a moment of extreme feeling, but that reading an accumulated series of posts will sometimes reveal another, more complete story. I talked about how taking the once-public blog and making it private, though tempting, felt like trying to revise history.

Knowing that the worst of my online oversharing is still publicly accessible doesn’t thrill me, but it doesn’t scare me anymore either. I might hate my former self, but I don’t want to destroy her, and in a way, I want to respect her decision to show the world her vulnerability. I’m willing to let that blog exist now as a sort of memorial to a time in my life when I thought my discoveries about myself and what I loved were special enough to merit sharing with the world immediately.

I understand that by writing here about how I revealed my intimate life online, I’ve now revealed even more about what happened during the period when I was most exposed. Well, I’m an oversharer — it’s not like I’m entirely reformed. But lately, online, I’ve found myself doing something unexpected: keeping the personal details of my current life to myself. This doesn’t make me feel stifled so much as it makes me feel protected, as if my thoughts might actually be worth honing rather than spewing. But I still have Emily Magazine as a place to spew when I need to. It will never again be the friendly place that it was in 2004 — there are plenty of negative comments now, and I don’t delete them. I still think about closing the door to my online life and locking them out, but then I think of everything else I’d be locking out, and I leave it open.

Emily Gould is a writer in Brooklyn. This is her first article for the magazine.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page MM32 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Exposed. Today's Paper|Subscribe